UK wages excluding bonuses rose by 6.6%, in the three months to February, surging past the estimate of a 6.2% rise. Wages including bonuses rose by 5.9% compared to estimates of 5.1%. The average continues to hide significant differences, as the government uses the power of the state to punish state employees as a means of trying to restrain wages and boost profits.
Average wage growth in the private sector was 6.9%, whereas for the state sector only 5.3%. In the finance and business services sector, wage growth was 8.3%. But, averages always hide much bigger differences that tell an important story. For example, we know that bus workers at Abellio, won an 18% pay rise after striking, and Rolls Royce workers won a 16.9% pay rise. Many more such pay increases have been won by workers that do not hit the headlines. Where workers are employed in larger concentrations, and able to organise, they can win substantial pay rises, as the above shows. Where they are employed in small numbers by small firms, its harder to organise, and employers can more easily simply replace workers if they threaten action.
The 6.9% figure, therefore, is likely to hide a wide disparity of actual settlements in the private sector, with workers in larger firms getting bigger pay rises, way in excess of the average, and large numbers of workers in small firms getting pay rises way below the average, or none at all. Given that the Tories are the party of the small business class, and their ideology revolves around its world, its the workers employed by their friends in these small businesses they are talking about when they say that they are getting lower pay rises than state employees are being offered. That is the world they seek to create, and its what Brexit was all about.
But, the reality, here, is also different. Whilst small employers can more easily replace a small number of workers, by the same token, the largely unskilled workers employed can also more easily move their labour-power to some other employer. This is one reason the Quit Rate rose. That is workers, particularly employed in small firms, where they could not organise in unions easily, and leverage higher wages, find it easier to get higher pay simply by looking for another job, and so they quit their existing job, and move to another.
That was a common feature of the 1950's and 60's, and even early 1970's, reflecting a growing relative shortage of labour. The average increase for workers simply shifting employer is 14%, giving an indication of where the average really is for the amount employers are prepared to pay if unions were to press them by stopping the ineffective one day strikes, and engage in an all-out strike, as used to be the case in previous decades. The union leaders are being timid, and tailing their own members, at a time when they should be providing leadership.
After all, its not as though workers are not showing a thirst for joining unions in large numbers once again, as also happened in the 1950's and 60's, nor for those workers being prepared to strike having joined the unions for that purpose. The timid RCN leadership recommended the government's insulting pay offer, but the members overwhelmingly rejected it anyway, demanding more strikes be organised.
We need a new, leadership in the unions that stops tailing their members, and concerning itself with public opinion shaped and manipulated by the Tories and the Tory media, and that starts winning the kind of double digit pay rises that individual workers have been getting for themselves, simply by moving jobs. In fact, we know that where there have been severe labour shortages, for example, for lorry drivers, employers have been prepared to pay 30% higher wages, in leisure and hospitality they paid up to 18% extra as they competed for scarce labour. In the NHS, faced with huge labour shortages, whilst they refuse to give their own workers a decent pay rise, they pay out huge sums, way in excess of their workers wages to private companies and individuals, to provide contract workers, to do the same jobs!
What we have, at the moment, is a shell game, in which the government is trying to con workers into accepting or demanding lower wages by trying to persuade them that other workers are accepting much lower wage rises than they have been offered. The government can most easily do that with its own workers such as health workers, teachers, civil servants and so on, where it controls the purse strings. But, the reality is that workers outside the state sector are already getting these large pay rises, other than those employed in inefficient, low value small firms, and those workers are responding to that, by simply moving to other jobs, preferably with expanding larger companies.
That leaves the state workers with the only other choice of facing down the Tory government by taking strike action, which is what they have been doing. As employment continues to rise, (employment rose by 190,000 in February), and labour shortages grow, that puts workers on a firmer footing to take such action, and demand the wage rises they need to match the high levels of inflation that the policies of conservative social-democracy has created over the last 40 years by continual excess printing of money tokens, to inflate asset prices.
In February, 350,000 days of strike action took place, up by 50% from the 210,00 in January, and that figure has risen further since February. We are back to the kind of days lost to strikes of the Thatcher era, in the early 1980's, but, unlike then, workers are, now, on the front foot. Back then, new technologies introduced by capital to respond to the crisis of overproduction of capital/shortage of labour/squeeze on profits from rising wages, had created a relative surplus population and rising unemployment. Today, the opposite conditions apply.
The main weakness is the inadequate nature of the union and labour movement leadership that its timid and tailing way behind the actual working-class. We need a new rank and file leadership, able to organise within the workplace and seize control of the industrial action, using wildcat strikes where appropriate to win against employers, rather than workers being drawn into the long drawn out, bureaucratic processes of arbitration and so on. That new leadership should just, for now, by-pass the existing bureaucratic leaders, and start organising all-out action, forgetting about all the Tory laws demanding lengthy ballots and rigmarole before action can be taken. The rank and file leaders should work across unions to coordinate action, and give solidarity action in support, in defiance of Tory anti-union laws, and we need to begin replacing the current leaders with new leaders forged in the fire of this new rank and file movement.
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